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When it comes to my nerdery, Strat-O-Matic hits several sweet spots: history, baseball, statistics and board games.  Invented in 1961, the dice rolling game is fun for settling those abstract questions like how would Ty Cobb hit against Roger Clemens in their primes, etc.  You can play historical teams against one another and it’s all really fun if you are into any of the above mentioned subjects. 

One of the things the game never had was the participation of the great Negro League players like Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Cool Papa Bell, Buck Leonard, ad infinitum.  Until now!  MORE »

Freakonomics looks, ever so slightly, at the price of marriage.  It’s decrease with the dismissal of syphallitic blood tests have led to a 6% increase in marriages since 1980.  

And yet, it’s no secret that divorce rates are up (due to any number of factors but mostly to the lack of stigma surrounding divorce now).  Although, they aren’t nearly as bad as people make them out to be.  

“A very neat new study allows one to use the differential timing of the repeal of blood-test laws to infer what the demand curve for marriage licenses looks like as the implied price decreases,” writes Daniel Hamermesh.  He surmises that increasing the price of a marriage license could lead to less impetuous marriages — the kind that will ultimately lead to broken homes, unhappy coules, divorces, or unwanted children.  

But then he also rationalizes that the unintended consequence of raising the price of a marriage license could be an increase in the out-of-wedlock birth rates.  Sound the alarm!  Except that we know those birth rates have already been increasing significantly in America and so there would seem to be no correlation between the two.  

Here, raising the price of a marriage license (and to a degree allowing everyone to get married or abolishing the government from being in the “marriage” racket) isn’t a terrible idea if it keeps people from jumping into a marriage that won’t last.  

It’s a serious decision that requires serious thought and shouldn’t be taken lightly.  

Now, if someone can just do something about the actual costs of marriage ceremonies.  That’s getting absurd.  

Also?  Bouncy castles at weddings — thumbs up or thumbs down?

In just under seven months the Baseball Prospectus rockstar (he invented PECOTA!!!) has gone from a beloved baseball stats geek to the buzzed about political projectionist.  Having followed him from his days as “Poblano” on his Daily Kos diaries it’s been great to see his site Fivethirtyeight.com grow into what it has and a bit strange to see him make nightly appearances on news shows and especially the Colbert Report.  But the accolades are well deserved.

New York Magazine did a profile of Silver, and the most interesting aspect of the article, besides the little details about his life (online poker player making six-figures! loves burritos! seems a bit restless!) is the nuts and bolts of his sabermetric analysis applied to political polls.

Meanwhile, even as his primary model attracted attention, Silver was cooking up another idea. He figured there must be a better way to use the daily tracking polls to predict a candidate’s future, just as he’d once found a better way to use baseball stats to predict how many home runs a player might hit. His simple goal, as he explained on Daily Kos in late February, was to “assess state-by-state general-election polls in a probabilistic manner.” In other words, he wanted to find a way to use all those occasionally erratic, occasionally unreliable, occasionally misleading polls to tell him who would win the election in November, which at that point was over 250 days away.

It’s a tough business, being an oracle. Everyone cheers when you hit a bull’s-eye, but no one’s arrows fly true all the time. “Sometimes being more accurate means you’re getting things right 52 percent of the time instead of 50,” says Silver. “PECOTA is the most accurate projection system in baseball, but it’s the most accurate by half a percent.” That half-percent, though, makes all the difference. Silver’s work, in both baseball and politics, is about finding that slim advantage. “I hate the first 90 percent [of a solution],” he says. “What I want is that last 10 percent.”

Silver and his site (along with Sean Quinn) has become a life raft in a sea of partisan talking heads.  Over the past year, Silver has grown from a stats hound into an astute political commentator who remains above the fray despite being an unabashed Democrat.  His is the only political site that has felt necessary this election season.

Also, currently Silver has Obama at 94.9% chance to win the election currently racking up an astounding 359.8 electoral votes.  Though we’ll have to wait until November 4 to find out if he’s been right all along.

Greg Gillis, aka Girl Talk, has put together one of the years most frenetic and enjoyable albums with Feed the Animals.� He basically smashed up most of popular music over the past 40 years to craft 14 songs.� It’s like listening to the radio for those with ADD, but hearing something new instead.� Sometimes it’s glorious and sometimes it can be a bit much.

To be honest, though I love the album, I have to be doing house chores or partying when listening to it.� It’s the kind of album that if you listen to it intently can be a bit jarring.� Instead, I like to listen to it in the background when I’m not really paying attention to the music only here or there.

Anyway, the album was a donate-download (grab it before it’s too late) earlier this year and once it streets in physical form it’s going to be a copyright and legal headache. It shouldn’t.� It’s a work of art and consummate skill.

Wired provided a bit of deconstruction on the album, but Andy Baio over at Waxy has done some incredible statistical analysis of the album that is just amazing.� It’s great to be able to see the album and have a better appreciation for just how complicated and difficult what Greg was able to accomplish.

Mr. Gillis takes familiar songs and makes them new, he makes things that don’t belong together sound as if there was only one way to hear them. Like overlaying vocals from Jay-Z over a music sample from Radiohead’s “Paranoid Android” that segues into “Real Love” by Mary J. Blige with a backing beat of “These Eyes” from The Guess Who, among the many other samples contained within.

Andy breaks it down.� For example: “There are 14 tracks on Feed the Animals, with a total of 264 sampled songs. “What It’s All About” and “Like This” have 26 sampled songs each, tying for the most, while “Don’t Stop” has the fewest at 11 songs. Overall, the album averages 19.8 songs sampled per track.

The timeline below shows where each sample was triggered across the entire album, as a percentage of the song’s duration. (For example, a marker at the 50% mark on the 9th line means that a sample started halfway through track #9, “Hands In the Air.”) You can get a sense of the flow of the album, how Gregg spaces samples apart and occasionally switches moods entirely by introducing three samples in quick succession.”

Also: Girl Talk puts on one of the most undeniably amazing live shows around.� It’s a giant dance party, you have to experience it to believe it.

Mp3: Girl Talk – “Set it Off”